


i never want once from the cherry tree

by kaielle



Category: In the Flesh (TV)
Genre: "Kieren deserved someone who worshipped him", F/M, M/M, also cancer is extensively talked about here, amy dyer is an angel and i love her, and by someone who has nevr had nor known anyone closely who has suffered from cancer, brief mention of Rick macy/Kieran Walker, but hopefully you can forgive me, if it helps i did some research, just you wait she'll be back, lol Simon talkin bout you, or else, so basically ignorance is abound
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-13
Updated: 2014-08-13
Packaged: 2018-02-13 01:29:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2131917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaielle/pseuds/kaielle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For one perfect afternoon, Amy Dyer was alive.  She was bold and brazen and ecstatic and reckless, with her two best friends in love with one another and a brilliant boy's hand laced through hers, and it just so happened her body was blinking into life, too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i never want once from the cherry tree

**Author's Note:**

> title from "work song" by hozier.
> 
> "There's nothing sweeter than my baby  
> I never want once from the cherry tree  
> Cause my baby's sweet as can be  
> She give me toothaches just from kissin me  
> ...  
> And I was burnin up a fever  
> I didn't care much how long I lived  
> ...  
> In the lowland plot I was free  
> Heaven and hell were words to me."

Amy Dyer never got to be a teenager.  The day before her thirteenth birthday she woke up with a smile stretching out her face, anticipation tingling in her fingertips, and a seizure lurking beneath her skin.  It didn't seem to care much for loitering, and stepped out into the harsh light of day when she was shrugging on her jumper, about to go off to meet her friends for pre-celebration shakes.  She collapsed on the living room floor while her mum and dad were watching a documentary on modern health care, her bones an electric mess lashing out against the confines of her flesh and sinew.  At least she spiraled down with irony.

Her parents waited agonizingly for the seizure to pass before her dad gathered her up in his arms and piled her into the car.  The day rolled over into the next and Amy Dyer got to spend her birthday in the ugly lights of the hospital just outside of town, held under observation, clad not in the bubbly vintage dress her mother had laid out on her bed as a pre-birthday surprise the morning before, but in the thin itchy material of a hospital gown.  Her parents sat shiny bowed presents at her feet while they waited for the blood work to come back, and Amy set to opening them with heavy, drugged fingers.  As the paper shied off the boxes, various tokens were revealed: a chunky pair of black boots from her mum, fresh from the window of the odd equestrian shop in the center of town; an artsy hardcover about Victorian fashion, complete with wonderful watercolor illustrations, from her dad; and one of those floral hair clips from the old lady who lives at the end of their street, the kind she sold out of the boot of her car at Roarton committee meetings.

Her parents eventually left after eons of trying to persuade them that she was okay with staying the night by herself, really, an entire night alone would be paradise, they should go home and get some sleep so they're pepped up for when they do some real celebrating tomorrow.

When the nurse poked her head in to flick the light off for the night, Amy cried herself to sleep.

…

Of course it was Leukemia.  Finally about to be unleashed unto the world as the rebel she'd always looked forward to being and she was a _sick kid_ , the kind you avoided looking at in the hallway so as not to show them your pity, because everyone knew pity was the _worst_.

It sucked.

How was she supposed to stay up until three in the morning and sneak out her window to meet up with the gang for pancakes when she was so tired all the time?  How was she supposed to get herself a fit boyfriend with a suave makeout ambush when her lips bruised so easily and her skin was slowly becoming transparent?  Boys didn't want to kiss girls with veins drawn bold under their skin like map lines, who kissed with a time stamp.

 _Screw boys_ , she thought to herself, tossing angrily to her other side in the bed, her sheets getting tangled up around her calves, swirled around her limbs like cotton candy.

Her brush off didn't numb the ache in her chest.

…

She made it to another three years before her hair started falling out, after close to a year of getting better.  When it first happened, her fingers arranging her bangs in the mirror only to take a lock with them when she pulled them back, she stumbled backwards in shock and remorse and fell into the bathtub.  The bruises popped up under her skin not even a half hour later.

The only thought that ran in a circle around her sickly skull was that she'd never done anything to it her entire life, never chopped off the pieces that famed her face into blunt bangs, or cut it just about to her skull like that girl two years above her who she secretly stared at out of the corner of her eye in admiration whenever they crossed paths, or even dyed it so much as a shade lighter.  She'd never done anything with it aside from the two cuts she got her mum to schedule every year.

She walked out of the house in a daze, her mother shouting sharply after her, her boot-clad feet clanking against the sidewalk.  Before she knew it, she was meandering down the hair product aisle at the pharmacy in town, her fingers skipping over the curled hair color samples glued onto the price tags of the hair dye kits.  They landed on the 'golden blonde' and stuck, Amy's body swiveling around to face it with all her attention.  She thumbed the little curl of synthetic hair, and a grin bloomed across her mouth.  The color was rich as butter, bright and golden, and _alive_.  She ran it up to the counter and bought it with her recent birthday money, swinging the bag back and forth in her hand as she walked out of the store, whistling the old Beatles tune that had been statically playing over the speakers of the pharmacy, the one her dad sang when he was flipping pancakes at the stove on Sunday mornings.

…

She was never sure what she did wrong, how it could have possibly gone so astray, but when she wiped the condensation off her bathroom mirror with a quick swivel of her newly bony hand, a trashy mermaid stared back at her, hair the green hue of olives, or maybe the sludge at the bottom of a garbage bin.

She panicked for a moment, raising her skeletal hand to the seaweed chunk resting against the jut of her cheek.  She rubbed it between her fingers, the excess dye that hadn't caught on the terrycloth of the towel pressed into the engraving of her fingerprints.

Her eyes flicked back to her reflection in the mirror, and a manic grin broke out across her face.

She laughed the hardest she'd done in three years.

…

It was bullshit.  Complete bloody bullshit.

"I'm not even gonna have it anymore in a few months!" she seethed, incredulous, her knuckles letting out a horrible throbbing beneath the papery skin of her hands.  As if to concede her point, a thin lock of green-brown hair fell loose from the back of her skull and slipped down to her shoulder.

Headmistress Rooney just leveled her with a look, ratty brown hair tucked up dull and orthodox into a chignon at the back of her head.

"We're all sympathetic to your condition here, Ms.Dyer, we truly are, but that doesn't change the fact that you are student here just like any other, and that means having to follow the rules.  And the rules clearly state that hair must be kempt and natural in color."

"There's nothing _natural_ about this!" she shrieked, denying the hot tears that filmed across her eyes.  "There's…there's nothing _natural_ about your body giving up on you and your cells multiplying into some kind of army and trying to force you out, like biological murder- nothing _natural_ about chemicals killing your hair and evicting it out your skull, or your body being too susceptible to harsh bouts of side effects for you to be eligible for  your bleeding driver's license!"

Rooney stared back at her, face devoid of all emotion.  Amy sunk back into her chair.

"There's no need for theatrics, Ms.Dyer," Rooney said, sighing.  She leaned forward and shuffled some papers around on her desk before extending a sheet of pastel green paper to her.  Amy huffed, defeated and tired and aching, and leaned forward the distance necessary to gently grab the paper.  "Give that to your parents, return it signed by both of them, and promptly dye your hair back."

Amy stood up and left without a word.

…

Her fickle health took a steady decline over the following four years.  She stayed in school, smiling wanly at her friends as she watched them grow up, get kissed, cry over flunked exams, get piercings, show up to class hungover, make plans right in front of her to gather in Ricky's van early Saturday morning and drive down to the ocean to be back by late that evening.  That was nothing compared to the talk of university, though.  It was like a cannon ball through the gut every time one of them brought it up, MJ stressing out so much about it that she was going to give herself an ulcer, Ricky and Jack full of cocky giddiness at the idea of a new atmosphere.  They all had their entire lives paved out ahead of them in a seemingly endless stretch of road, and Amy found herself facing a dead end.

The doctors were getting more and more somber with each appointment, and it didn't take a PhD to know that the sand was nearly all drained into the bottom of her hourglass.  She knew she wouldn't make it past this last summer, this summer that was supposed to be filled with celebration - with driving down to the beach and going on dumb fishing trips on random stranger's property, shrieking with laughter as they ran to avoid getting caught.  It was supposed to be wistful with philosophical thoughts on growing up and the bittersweet sadness of saying goodbye to her friends to move on to something better.  It wasn't supposed to be filled with the back and forth of steroids vs. chemo, with having to wear hats when she wanted to wear her favorite floral hair clip because her hair was too thin nowadays to support it, with wearing baggy clothes in the muted heat to hide the sharpness of her bones while MJ and Tessa ran around in crop tops and ratty shorts that showed off the padding on their hips and the curve of their thighs, the things Amy didn’t have because the greedy cells in her body were eating her raw.

She spent the last half of the summer weighed down to her bed, her bones too heavy for her body, the tv always on, the volume a constant low thrum.  When Ricky and Jack left for uni, piling their cheap band equipment and their haphazardly packed suitcases into the pack of Ricky's van, they had to stop by her house to climb the cold steps up to her room to say goodbye because she hadn't been able to drag her brittle bones out of bed to the official goodbye down at the pub earlier.  She couldn't help the tears that slid from her lashes down the slope of her face when Ricky pressed a kiss to her cheek, his hands holding her like she wasn't breakable, like in that moment he would've done anything to change it all, to have her happy and healthy with a head full of hair piling into the van with them, shouting out all the words to the dopey mix cd they had waiting for them in the glove compartment.  She swallowed down the hiccuping sob that bubbled up in her throat at the _could have, should have_ 's, the _if life had been fair_ 's.  She'd nearly broken when Ricky had let go of her, Jack's weight digging into the bed to pull her into a gentler hug, pressing a kiss to the top of her spotty head, but she'd kept it together through the ensuing string of goodbyes and promises to call and visit until they were closing her door softly behind them.  She let the thunder and lightning banging around in her chest loose just as the van roared to life in the driveway, burying her raw, aching sobs into her pillow.

She fell asleep, exhausted, before the sun even went down, and slept for sixteen hours.

…

She survived the summer, but wished she hadn't the entire time.  Her mum became deluded with false hope and prodded her at breakfast (her parents refused to admit that their daughter slept until four in the afternoon and covered it up with false meal labels, amongst other things) with pamphlets to online universities.

"You could study psychology, become a coping counselor like your Nancy," she often said, looking at Amy like she was a walking miracle just for pulling herself downstairs for some cereal.

Amy just smiled back at her, ducking her gaze to the optimistic hydrogenated marshmallows downing in her sea of milk.  She'd been going to her weekly visits with Nancy for four years now, and never once had she left the Cancer Center feeling profound or at peace or liberated.  If that was what she had to look forward to becoming in life, why even bother.

Still, Amy picked up the pamphlets and dumped them across her bedside table when she made the exhausting trek back up the stairs to her room.

Life wasn't worth leaving her bed.

…

Amy Dyer died three years later after a bout of miraculous recovery in which she'd taken part in a budding doctor's drug trial and found herself with a full head of hair again (she forgot it later, but the doctor's name had been John Weston, and he'd been her least disliked doctor out of eight years worth of them.  Her mum had called him handsome when they got back to the car, and Amy had called her a daft cow and pretended to wretch out the window.  Her mum had laughed, long and delighted, at the life in her daughter in that small stretch of minutes).  She wore her flower clip every day, a bright burst of happiness bleeding out in her chest every time she slid the barrette through her thick, lively hair.  Her mum took to playing with her dark mane at the end of each night, twisting it around her fingers when Amy would plop down on the floor in front of where she sat in the old recliner in their living room, a watered down whiskey next to her on the end table.  They watched late night shows together and her mum would braid her hair over and over again before Amy yawned huge and obnoxious and her mum would send her off to bed.

Three months before her short life ended, Amy's health took a steep and unrecoverable nose dive.  Dr. Weston was baffled, his young eyes wide and completely bereft of answers, and Amy knew that this was the definite end.  The only upside to this particular bout of hell was that it seemed like she was going to get to keep her hair this time around.  Week after week filled chock full of appointments passed by in a haze of injections and blood draws, in drugs and sickness, in peaceful numbness.  The cancer, Dr. Weston informed her with the most serious face she'd ever seen, had spread to her stomach and the lining of her abdomen, and Amy laughed at the sight of him, digging her finger deep into the harsh set of his cheek.  He frowned at her, asking her if she'd understood what he'd just told her, and she instantly sobered, falling into herself in a way her unfruitful teenage years had never allowed.

"I'm going to die," she said, shrugging her mouth with an earnest lack of care, "and that's okay.  Just because I have cancer it doesn't mean I can't laugh at the little things, Mr. Doctor."

And somewhere in the room beyond Amy's realm of care her mum burst into ragged, horrible sobs.

…

She was in the hospital when it happened, hooked up to all sorts of horrible machines.  Her bones, perched crooked and sharp against the hard set of a hospital bed, felt like someone had taken a power drill to them, and her muscles felt like gritty liquid, the grains of them grinding up against one another with every rattling breath.  Her mother was asleep with her head on her father's shoulder, the two of them passed out in the uncomfortable chairs at her bedside.  She thought about how unfair it was for them, how much money they'd wasted on her only for her to die, how many years they'd given up in the name of familiar love, how they'd given up so much only to lose it all.  She thought about how their lives were going to go without her, how her mother would drink too much on her birthday and how she'd cry when this day rolled around next year, and the year after that, and the year after that.  She thought about how broken her dad was going to be.  She'd been his little princess ever since she was born.

She thought about her friends, too, about MJ, who'd, to everyone's great surprise, gotten married six months ago out of nowhere to some bloke training to be a dental hygienist, about Tessa with her doe eyes and small ears, who had stopped calling a year ago.  She thought about Jack, who left behind the life of a truly terrible drummer to become a startlingly good graphic designer in London.  Lastly she thought about Ricky.  Ricky with his beaten down van and his too-big feet and the music he still made but never shared.  Ricky who still came down to visit her at least once a year, who held her hand when he did and kissed her surprised mouth that one New Year's Eve.  Ricky who was flying in from his host family's house in Frankfurt to say goodbye, who  ordered her with a catch in his voice over the phone an hour ago "to hang in there for just a little while longer, for fuck's sake, Dyer".

And then she thought about herself.  About the not-quite-thirteen year old with the pretty pastel dress laid out across her bed and the friends waiting for her at the diner and the sheet of paper tacked up on her wall detailing all the things she had to do before college, like moon The Man and skinny dip in the ocean with MJ and Tessa.  She thought about the near decade of aches and pains and never quite being whole, always having one foot out the door, ankle caught in the trap of Death's cold fingers.

Then she thought about how she'd wanted to be a doctor when she was a kid and the funny things in life, and Amy Dyer died.

…

Undead, Amy was the most alive she'd ever been.  She paid no mind to the mottled state of her skin, because nothing of it mattered as long as it didn't reflect the life inside her, as long as the ashen state of her skin was a product of her rebirth and not of a greedy garrison of cells staging a coup within her.   Besides, she'd been that way for half her life anyway.  Now she found it beautiful.  Now the sooty state of her skin was a mark of her victory over the injustice of life.

…

There were downsides to the Rising.  A lot could happen in two years.   MJ had died a violent death, ripped apart by two rabid PDS victims when she was walking to her car from her in-laws house the night of the Rising.  Tessa was nowhere to be found, disappeared like smoke.  Jack, funny, kind Jack, had been swept up in the anti-Undead attitude and wouldn't so much as speak to her unless it was in terms of derogatory slurs (she went to the library one afternoon and looked him up, a feeling pooled in her gut.  An article popped up - a collection of obituaries for his mother, father, and fifteen year-old baby sister, dated a week after the Rising).  Ricky had stuck around in Roarton to help with Amy's funeral arrangements and take care of her family, according to a local news article, but had gotten back onto a plane back to Frankfurt a year later, on the night of the Rising.  His plane was struck by an ungoldy bolt of lightning and crashed.

Both her parents had been lost to the Rising.  Her dad had tried to save the little girl across the street who'd become a victim of PDS when her family locked her in the garage with the car running.  When he'd managed to get inside, apparently the family was so keen on putting their little girl back to rest where she belonged, that they trapped him in there with her, unwilling to let her go.  The two of them died of carbon monoxide poisoning.

Her mother had died of a broken heart it seemed.  Amy didn't blame her, though her own unbeating heart threatened to seize in her chest at the loss pressing into her from all sides.

…

Kieren Walker was the jumpiest thing she'd ever seen.  She chased him all across the cemetery before she had him cornered, and every time he looked at her she saw his marble heart lurch in his eyes.

She liked him much better this way, with his floppy hair and big doe eyes (she thought of Tessa but in a kind way, in the way of wistful memories that warmed you through and through like sunlight).  Much better than the frowny thing he'd been when…they'd all let go of their inhibitions for that brief stretch of time.  He was still frowny, but in a cute, pouty way, not in an insatiable, survival-of-the-fittest, creature-of-the-night way.

She saw right through him, saw the sadness at his core, and it pierced the ghost of sadness at her own center, the leech that had once been on her heart.  All at once she was filled with purpose, thinking of the day trips she'd begun to take up since she was released from government care, making up for all those days at the beach she'd missed sitting passenger side to Ricky.

So she dragged him along to the carnival down the way and let her the happiness of this, her second life, leak out of her like wisdom, wanting nothing more than for this boy with a sadness that echoed her own to feel the way she did now, to know the things she knew now, to love himself without err the way she loved herself now.

…

Rick Macy was kind of a big bag of dicks, and he didn't deserve Kieren in any sort of way.

"It's just an act," Kieren had assured her, before turning to follow after the man like a newly adopted puppy.  Amy didn't like it.  Kieren deserved someone who worshiped him, who washed themselves clean in his waters and spoke his name in the form of a psalm.  Someone who wasn't afraid to kiss him in public, to hold his hand where people might see, to look at him too long in a way people might gossip about.  Rick Macy didn't love himself, didn't even entertain the notion, and it made loving Kieren Walker the way he deserved to be loved impossible.

…

There was something about Philip Wilson, something that pressed up under her skin, demanding her attention.  She looked at him harshly out of the corner of her eye every time they crossed paths.  He carried himself around in a way practically designed to be hated, in clothes too old for him that looked like they'd been grave-robbed right off the bones of some right wing member of parliament, and a pinched look on his face, always serious and in such a dopey fashion.  He didn't have any solid loyalties to anyone - Amy'd sussed that out in his first breath in her presence - and he didn't seem to possess the necessary skills and/or experiences required to separate right from wrong into stark piles.  He was a mess, cooped up in his own body, confused and unaffiliated with one ideal or its counterpart.

Still, beneath the nauseous queasiness that rolled about in her stomach when he was around and the general disgust toward him and his attitudes that was perpetual and well known in their interactions, Amy saw the idleness of her first life filling him to the brim, and it made it impossible for her to deny him entirely, so spit upon his bones like she wanted to.

…

She hadn't slept with anyone since those three blokes during the grace periods between her bouts of sickness in her first life, and like everything else in her second life, this time around was the best.

When she unbuttoned her dress, Philip's hands found their way to her skin immediately, big palms sweeping over her stomach and around to her back, the ghosts of lit nerve endings playing out in her brain.

"You're actually quite beautiful," he'd slurred, still tipsy.  She'd laughed then, loud and free.

"What a smooth talker, honestly," she quipped, smiling oddly down at him, a strange sensation in her lips.  He shook his head at her then, tracing the marbled pattern of her skin with a single finger, the touch light as air.

"'M serious," he mumbled, his eyes catching on hers.  He pressed a kiss to the stretch of cold, mottled skin just above her navel.  Phantom butterflies bat their wings frantically in her stomach.  "Gorgeous."

When he pulled her down with a gentle hand at her waist, Amy let herself follow him, giggling in a frenzy of hysterical happiness.

…

He wanted to keep it a secret, to keep _her_ a secret, like she was some nasty back alley deal, like she was shameful and something to be embarrassed of.  It _hurt_.

When she glared him out of her room and into the street, she was left significantly colder than when she woke up.

 _Screw boys_ , she echoed, tucking her cheek into the soft material of her pillowcase and pulling her comforter up around her shoulders, her limbs drawn up around herself.

Kieren Walker was the only one worth so much as half a damn.

…

Her body was alight with feeling, not in the way of nerve endings and synapses, but in that of emotion.  Electricity lashed out from the cold column of her spine, sending shocks through limbs that felt hollow, and rage flooded over her in tides meant to crash against rocks, covering up the hole in her chest that wept from violation, from having her body turned against itself, from another injustice weighed down upon her already heavy frame.

The lipstick looked like blood when she tilted her head a certain way in the mirror, and for a moment, she pretended it was Gary's, and her teeth felt sharp against the soft tissue of the inside of her mouth.

…

Her heart bled for Kieren Walker when she heard about the Macys, and her fingers twitched in their need to frame the delicate edges of his face, to stand up on her tiptoes and press a kiss to the top of his weary head, and to tell him, "Things will work themselves out.  They always do."

"Come and meet the disciples," one of the girls from the compound said, poking her head into Amy's shared room excitedly, and Amy gently shut her laptop, sending the girl a smile.  "They want to get to know more about you!"

"Well, can't say that I'll disappoint," Amy grinned, flouncing out of her chair and out the door, tucking her arm into the crook of the girl's elbow.  They shared an excited laugh down the hall.

…

"So, Amy, you never said where you're from," one of the disciples was saying, all twelve of them lounging around the edges of the communal table, a few of the other Redeemed interspersed throughout them.  She smiled at him - she thought his name started with a J, something like Jake, or Jackson, or maybe Jaime, none of it sounded quite right - smoothing her skirt out across her thighs under the table, fingering the familiar fabric.

"Came up from Roarton, bit south of here," she said, and she couldn't miss the way all conversation seemed to dim out into a focused silence across the table.

"Roarton?" a lilted voice asked from her left.  She turned to find a dark haired disciple staring at her with a piercing gaze, face curious and kind, sweater too cozy for the seriousness trapped beneath his skin.  "Did you rise there, by chance?"

"Sure did," she nodded, leaning back in her chair.  A buzzing murmur broke out across the table, but Amy did her best to ignore it and tune it out, her hands playing with the material of her skirt anxiously.  She didn't let it show on her face.

"You're a very special girl, Amy Dyer," he said to her then, and his emphasis on the word _special_ had something warm ebbing out into her chest.  "Simon," he said then, his mouth lifting into a crooked smile, extending his hand, and Amy smiled as she took it.

…

"The prophet has a mission for you," Simon said when she fell back onto the couch next to him, wrapping his arms around her, his hands resting, fingers laced, against her sternum.

"For _me_?" she asked incredulously, turning around to give her disciple a dubious wide-eyed look.

"Yes, _for you_ ," he said fondly, resting his chin atop her head.

"Well, what am I to do?" she asked.  There was another phantom feeling in her chest, like her heart beating a hummingbird tattoo, even though it was cold and unmoving as marble.

"Just go back home.  Visit your friend, the sad artist one, roam your old stomping grounds, paint the town red."

Amy got quiet, her fingers fiddling with one another.  Simon noticed.  Of course he did.

"I'm comin' with ya, you know," he said then, and then she forced all the tainted thoughts of home away in favor of the sunlit ideas blooming across the forefront of her mind.

"Are you now?" she asked, and he hummed his 'yes'.  "Well that's fantastic!  We can go to the carnival up the way and ride the Twisted Tornado until everyone else gets sick, and we can drive down to the beach  - there's this little cranny in the dunes that no one else knows about that's perfect for digging your toes into and watching the tide come and go - oh!  And I can introduce you to Kieren!  God, I miss the little buck, I hope he's doing okay.  You'll like him I think - I mean, he's right gorgeous and just about the best thing ever so of course you'll like him.  I think you'd be good for him."

"Good for him?" Simon prodded, and Amy praised him internally for his unfailing ability to keep up with her.

"He's a bit of a lost little bird at the moment.  Doesn't appreciate himself like I do, like all of us would," she said, talking about the commune.  "All he ever tries to do is slip away into the crowd; he covers up his gorgeous face with a thick mask of mousse and hides behind his dumb contacts even when he's at home, just lying about on the couch."  She felt herself getting worked up and slicked down her ruffled feathers.  "And then there's the whole business with his Rick getting offed, for the _second_ _time_ , mind you.  The boy's been through the ringer, is what I'm trying to say, I guess, and I think you, Mr. Disciple, with all your 'wisdom' and your 'personal enlightenment', could help him sort some of it out."

"I'll do my best," he smiled, tapping his finger against the flat plane at the top of her chest, a hollow feeling ringing out through her body.  "Anyone someone as great as you speaks so highly of must be heaven and then some."

"He is," she sighed contentedly, leaning further into his chest.  "Just promise you won't love him more than me - it'll be a hard thing to resist," she joked.  Simon moved his hands across her collarbones to rest on her shoulders, giving them a playful squeeze before swiping his fingers across the skin there rhythmically.

"It'd be impossible to love anyone more than I love you," he said, and she laughed giddily to herself, smacking him lightly across the arm.

"Keep your eyes on the prize, Mr. Disciple," she chastised, and he huffed out a laugh behind her, the cool air brushing across the back of her neck.

…

They weren't exactly fast friends.  She caught the two of them arguing more often than not, brushing past one another heatedly whenever she'd walk into the room.  Things had gotten more passionate between them over the past week, or so it seemed.  Before it had just been Kieren getting uncomfortable whenever Simon tried to talk to him about the ULA and instill in him his purpose in his second life, and a few annoyed glances here and there.  Now they put on a whole show for her benefit, acting calm and relaxed with one another just to hash it out whenever she had to leave them alone.  It was like a stake run right through her heart; she'd wanted them to get along so bad, had such grand ideas for their future, of the three of them sticking out eternity together.

"What's up with you and Simon?" she asked Kieren one day when she had him cornered at one of their Give Back meetings.  He nearly choked on his own tongue.

"What?" he hissed.  She shook her head at him, eyes wide and incredulous.  _Boys_.

"The two of you!" she said, gesturing emphatically.  "It's like you're going to go to World War III any day now!"

Kieren cocked his head at her, brows dipping in bewildered confusion.

"What are you on about, Amy?"

"You and Simon!"

"Aye!" They whipped their heads around to the stage where Gary was looking at them threateningly, a script held tight in his hand.  "Either pay attention, or be Non-Compliant, got it?"

Amy sneered at him and Kieren nodded tightly once.  Gary just rolled his eyes at them and turned back to the skit.

"You two always get so weird when I'm around, all this tension in the air," Amy whispered in Kieren's ear, ignoring Gary and his general assholery as she always did.  She hated having to be cooped up in the same room with him.  It made her blood fizzle. "I'm afraid I'm going to come back from my 'community service' one day and find that you've punched his heart out and washed the floor with him!"

Kieren's features softened.  "Amy-"

"Kieren Walker!" Dean called from the front, and Kieren sighed, defeated, beside her.  "You're up."

…

She hated Philip Wilson.  Honestly, she did.

…

The feeling that flooded her chest when she stumbled upon her two boys in the street, Kieren kissing her disciple, chaste and sweet, like he was stealing pollen from his lips, was an amalgam of not quite's.   It wasn't quite anger.  It wasn't quite betrayal.  It wasn't quite sadness, or hurt, or self-deprecation for being so foolish.  It was just a big tangle of half-bitten feelings, and a welcome wash of understanding.  Somewhere beneath it all there was even a spark of happiness, too, because her boys had got on after all.

 _I should've known, Kieren Walker_ , she thought to herself as she quickly walked back the way she came and disappeared inside the bungalow, pressing her back lightly against the door when she'd closed it, her palms pressed against the wood.  _It's impossible not to love you best._

…

Seeing Philip courageous and heart-breakingly righteous did her in.  It was like being baptized of all his wrong doings, leaving her with nothing but that piece of her she found within him, shiny and reflective like a mirror shard.

"You," he said.  And she knew it was coming, in the way that you knew the bat was going to hit the ball a second before it did, that they were going to collide wonderfully, but it still knocked her flat to hear it.  She could see it now, see the pinch of his face as the pining it had been, the misguided attempts to spend time with her that she'd thought were just universal punishment, the way he always stared after her, not in regret, but in longing.  It rattled her like a hand around her spine shaking her entire skeleton.

…

They fell into her bed, limbs tangled around one another in knots, mouths open with the giddy exhalation of laughter.  He touched her just like he had the first time, hands trailing her skin with awe, and she knew that this time would be different, that he'd grown up in the last year, that he knew what he wanted now.

"I've never wanted anything, Amy Dyer, until you showed up, and I've been delirious with it ever since," he said, his nose bumping into hers, and she smiled at him, small and real and light as air.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah," he nodded, threading his fingers through her hair, his palm cupping the back of her head.  "I think about you all the time.  Whenever I make breakfast or eat anything, really, I think about you and how witty you are and the curve of your mouth when you made fun of me for that damn toaster; whenever I breathe I think about how you don't have to, and how incredible that is; whenever I get scared I think about you and how defiant and bold you are, how you're not afraid to be every inch of yourself.  Every thought that goes through my thick, dense skull is an echo of you, and-"

Amy shut him up with a kiss, pressing hard into the lines of him, heat doing imaginary cartwheels in the lifeless chasm of her chest.

"I like you too, Philip Wilson."

…

For one perfect afternoon, Amy Dyer was alive.  She was bold and brazen and ecstatic and reckless, with her two best friends in love with one another and a brilliant boy's hand laced through hers, and it just so happened her body was blinking into life, too.

She'd wanted to tell Kieren everything, earlier. She'd wanted to tell him about how she was okay with him and Simon because the two of them had never really been anything like that, now had they, and she wanted him to tell her all about it, to see a smile on his face that was put there by love, see how different he looked. She wanted to poke fun at Simon and crack jokes about the two of them sharing grandpa sweaters, and she wanted to know how it happened, when it happened, why it happened, because what did it matter who was with who when they all were together for the rest of their lives? What did it matter whether it her and Simon, or her and Kieren, or Kieren and Simon, when the three of them were going to be a triangle, connected forever, until Amy's body lived out its last life. She'd wanted to tell him about that too, to plant a delirious kiss on his cute mouth and tell him about how she could feel it, maybe tell him that his lips were chapped, describe to him the temperature of his body, because she could do that now. She wanted to tell him about how scared she'd been and how she couldn't bear the idea of leaving him behind to become that girl-shaped thing in the super market again. She wanted to tell him about the nose bleeds and the headaches, about the seizures and the hunger, about the way rain felt on her skin, but they didn't have time.

It was okay, though, she thought as she held Philip's hand at the fete, her teeth digging into a caramel apple, her taste buds lighting up like Christmas lights beneath the sweetness of it.  She pressed a kiss to his mouth and he laughed at the caramel taste of it.  She had all the time in the world. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> i need to stop staying up late writing fic. that's just a fact.  
> (also i'm sorry for that ending but it had to be because no way was i writing about her getting stabbed okay so you'll have to deal with the melancholy send off)


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